Cruel and Usual Punishment

Video

Weingarten's Experiment in Action

Investigative humorist Gene Weingarten endures 24 hours of constant punditry, and lives to write about it.

» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER

"KNOWLEDGE IS NOT INTELLIGENCE." -- Heraclitus of Ephesos.

"Information is not knowledge." -- Albert Einstein.

". . . the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco.

Print journalism is famously dying; everyone knows it. Reports of its imminent demise are everywhere, and serious reservations exist as to whether the potentates of ink can stay financially afloat by converting to an all-pixel format. If they cannot, it will be bad news for the pundit industry, or pundustry. (This is a word I just coined. As I write this, "pundustry" returned no Google hits. By next month it will generate hundreds. The pundustry will see to it.) Opinion flingers feast on the print media as a source of both information and outrage; on this day, much of the snide and snarling portion of the blogosphere erupted from newspaper stories of the day. One of these, appearing in several newspapers, reported that Hillary Clinton was likely to fight tooth and nail for the nomination, even at a grave cost to Democratic harmony and the party's chances for success in the general election. This story alone, by my imprecise count, was cited by at least 45 blogs, which in turn cited at least 240 other print media stories, online media stories or blog entries, creating a towering souffle of more than 1,400 breathy comments by blog readers.

One blogger on Brilliant at Breakfast is comparing Hillary to Scarlett O'Hara: sullenly possessive of what she deems her property, willing to sow the earth of her plantation with salt to keep it from the grasp of the cackling, evil overseer Jonas Wilkerson, in the person of Barack Obama. I thought this an imperfect but charmingly original analogy; alas, a quick search reveals it is a variation of a recurring pundustry theme, going back at least a year, tweaked and twisted to assert whatever point is to be snarked at the moment. Sometimes, Obama is Scarlett; more often, Hillary is. In one variation, Bill Clinton is Jonas and Hillary is Emmie Slattery, the evil overseer's felicitously named trashy mistress-turned-wife. The pundustry is self-pollinating, but mutations abound, and, when they happen, they advance the narrative. In this way, the Web replicates evolution.

On the radio, Laura Ingraham is finding it outrageous that New York City is going to give out free condoms under the jaunty, double-entendred slogan "Get some!" Laura sneers: "Sex out of wedlock! Let's celebrate!" On TV, Pat Buchanan is thinking John McCain will no longer consider Mike Huckabee as his running mate. The Corner says Slate says Obama could steal the Catholic vote from McCain. The Hotline says Edwards is seriously considering backing Hillary. ABC News says Obama says he and Edwards are buddies. Michelle Malkin calls the mayor of Toledo a "jerk" for somehow dissing the Marines. Politico.com says the New Republic's Jon-athan Chait says that the reason McCain is attacking Obama is that he secretly would rather run against Hillary. The Huffington Post links to a site that worries that Obama's economic plan might be unworkable. Drudge says an Arizona newspaper says insiders say McCain says he may soon resign his Senate seat. In a crawl, FoxNews asks, "Should McCain Consider Sexy Rice as VP?"

Sexy Rice? I mean, true, but . . . ?

I do a double-take. My bad. It's "Sec'y Rice." Some things are beginning to happen around the start of Hour Five involving the nature of perception. Drowned in information, the brain gets soggy and sloppy.

During the last years of his life, when my father's eyesight began to go, he started hallucinating. He was seeing colorful little people in military uniforms dancing into his fuzzy line of sight; of all the images he could still make out, only these little people were completely and consistently clear. Diagnosis: He was not going mad. He was going blind, and when the brain finds itself starving for imagery, it sometimes creates its own.

Something of the opposite was happening to me: Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion, beset by twaddle, my brain hungered for simplicity and found it. What happens is that you focus on small things. For example, you suddenly become aware that sometime in the last few years, as if in a heinous conspiracy of the dimwitted, Americans have decided that the second month of the year is pronounced Feb-ooh-ery. Not Feb-RU-ery, which is correct, or Feb-YOU-ery, which is ignorant but tragically legitimized by the dictionary, but Feb-OOH-ery, which is a national disgrace far greater, in my opinion, than dissing the Marines. Or so it seems at the moment.

I am still seething over this when I notice an interesting two-pronged phenomenon. Prong one is that there is often an amusing disconnect between the subject of a broadcast and the subject of the news crawl beneath it. Prong two is that if you have five TVs on at the same time, and each features a talking head with the sound muted, and you also have a radio playing, it is very often possible to find one muted talking head whose lips happen to synch uncannily with the radio. And so, with only a little mental effort, one can watch a TV screen upon which George W. Bush strides purposefully down a path beside the White House, looking solemn and concerned, stands at a lectern and begins to speak in Laura Ingraham's voice, whining about condoms, while below him runs a crawl reading, "Man Carrying Adult Diapers Kills Woman With Meat Cleaver."

AT THE START OF HOUR SIX, I realize I am doing something no one else likely has ever done before, something no one should ever do again. I am listening to both Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly simultaneously, on two radios.